IX.

signed it, was also expelled. The men of Boston inclined CHAPTER to re-elect these expelled deputies; but Cotton, with much ado, dissuaded them. Two new deputies were chosen, 1637. but one of these was rejected because he too had signed the obnoxious petition; so the vacant seat remained unfilled. Wheelwright having refused to leave Boston, or to give up his public "exercisings," was disfranchised and banished. He appealed to the king, but was told that no such appeal lay, for, "by the king's grant," the General Court was empowered "to hear and determine, without any reservation."

Mrs. Hutchinson was also banished; but, because it was winter, she was placed in custody in a private house in Roxbury, none but her relations and the elders being permitted to see her. Captain Underhill, hero lately in the Pequod war, was next called to account. He boasted, some time after, of having received his "assurance" while enjoying a pipe of that "good creature" tobacco, "since which he had never doubted of his good estate, neither should, though he should fall into sin." Indeed, he was a little too fond of other good creatures to suit the austere taste of Massachusetts. As he persisted in justifying the petition, he was deprived of his office, and disfranchised, as were five or six others of the principal signers. All signers of that document, except about twenty who submitted and acknowledged their fault, and all others who had been active on Mrs. Hutchinson's side, were ordered to bring in and deliver up their arms; an order to which fifty-eight freemen of Boston, and others in Charlestown, Salem, Ipswich, and Newbury, reluctantly submitted. Finally, a law was passed subjecting to fine and imprisonment all who should defame the court and its proceedings; and, lest "godly friends in England" might be alarmed, and discouraged from removal,

CHAPTER an account of this whole transaction, "with reasons and

IX. observations," was drawn up, and sent home to be pub

1637. lished.

Mrs. Hutchinson's husband, Coddington, John Clarke, educated a physician, and other principal persons of the Hutchinsonian party, were given to understand that, unless they removed of their own accord, proceedings would be taken to compel them to do so. They sent, therefore, to seek a place of settlement, and found one in Plymouth patent; but, as the magistrates of that colony declined to allow them an independent organization, they presently purchased of the Narragansets, by the recommendation 1638. of Williams, the beautiful and fertile Island of Aquiday. March 24. The price was forty fathoms of white wampum; for the additional gratuity of ten coats and twenty hoes, the present inhabitants agreed to remove. The purchasers called it the Isle of Rhodes-a name presently changed by use to RHODE ISLAND. Nineteen persons, having signed a covenant "to incorporate themselves into a body politic," and to submit to "our Lord Jesus Christ" and to his "most perfect and absolute laws," began a settlement at its northern end, with Coddington as their judge or chief magistrate, and three elders to assist him. They were soon joined by others from Boston; but those who were "of the rigid separation, and savored Anabaptism," removed to Providence, which now began to be well peopled.

Having obtained, at the same time with the cession of Aquiday, a formal grant of Providence, by another Oct. 8. deed shortly after Williams admitted his associates and

such others" as the major part shall receive into the same fellowship of vote," as joint owners. A covenant to submit "in civil things only" to the orders of "the major part," was at the same time agreed to.

IX.

Mrs. Hutchinson withstood all the strenuous efforts CHAPTER for her conversion made by the elders during her winter's imprisonment at Roxbury. She even fell into new er- 1638. rors, maintaining that men's souls, mortal by generation, are made immortal by Christ's purchase-a heresy afterward adopted by the celebrated Locke. She denied the resurrection of the body, and asserted that Sunday is but as other days. Had up before the Boston Church, in a session which lasted from eight in the morning to ten at night, she was "clearly confuted," and then solemnly admonished by Cotton, so lately her adherent, "with much zeal and detestation of her errors and pride of opinion." At a subsequent church meeting, after much time and March 22. many arguments "to bring her to see her sin," the church with one consent "cast her out." After she was excommunicated, her spirits, which seemed before somewhat dejected, revived again, and she gloried in her sufferings, declaring "it was the greatest happiness next to Christ that ever befell her."

Having received orders from the governor to leave the jurisdiction, she sought refuge at Providence, but soon joined her husband and friends at Aquiday. On some hint that Mary Dyer, one of her chief disciples at Boston, had brought forth a monstrous birth, the magistrates of Massachusetts investigated the matter with eager curiosity and disgusting minuteness. A somewhat similar. accident, the result, doubtless, of excitement and persecution, was presently said to have happened to Mrs., Hutchinson herself. These occurrences were eagerly seized upon as providential proofs of the monstrosity of her opinions, and are relied on as such in the "Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines of New England," written by Welde, minister of Roxbury, in a very ferocious style, and published a

CHAPTER few years after in England. Even the terrible charge IX. of witchcraft was insinuated against Mrs. Hutchinson1638. for how, unless by supernatural aid, could she inveigle into error?

so many

These vigorous proceedings against the dissidents were Sept. 6. followed up by two laws, one subjecting to assessment and distress all who did not voluntarily contribute according to their ability to all town charges, "as well for upholding the ordinances in the churches as otherwise;" the other, exposing excommunicated persons to fine, imprisonment, and banishment, at the pleasure of the magistrates, as "their contempt and obstinacy shall deserve." But this last law was soon répealed.

As the final triumph of the orthodox party, Cotton, at Dec. 13. a public fast, "did confess and bewail his own and the Church's security and credulity whereupon so many dangerous errors had gotten up." He showed how he came to be deceived, the errors being artfully formed so near the truth he had preached, that at first he did not perceive their enormity. By this seasonable concession "did that reverend and worthy minister of the Gospel recover his former splendor throughout the country of New England.”

Immediately after his banishment, Wheelwright had purchased of the Indians a tract of land at the falls of the Squamscot, a southern branch of the Piscataqua; and there, with some of his adherents, he founded the town and church of EXETER, which remained for the next three years an independent community, with a frame of gov ernment agreed on by the inhabitants. Wheelwright and his associates continued, however, to be so far recog nized by the Boston Church as to receive a regular dismission. The neighboring settlements on the Piscataqua, at Portsmouth and Dover, furnished an asylum to other of the refugees. The Lords Say and Brooke had

IX.

sold out their interest in the upper plantation to the resi- CHAPTER dents there; and one Burdett, a discontented minister from Massachusetts, had got himself elected governor. 1638. He appears to have carried on a correspondence. with Archbishop Laud, in which he gave no very favorable account of the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of New England. After a voyage to England, and a vain attempt to regain the favor of the Boston Church, in the course of which he was charged with "suspicion of incontinency," the banished Underhill retired to Dover, and, much to the disgust of the Massachusetts magistrates, presently got himself chosen governor in Burdett's place. Burdett was also, through Underhill's contrivance, superseded as minister by one Knolles, recently arrived in Massachusetts, but who, being suspected of "famistical opinions," had been " denied residence" there. The principal interest in the lower Piscataqua plantation, or Portsmouth, seems to have belonged to Mason; but he was now dead, and, in payment of their wages, his agents shared among them the goods and cattle, the lands and houses, and, like their neighbors of Dover and Exeter, organized an independent government of their own. Hampton, the fourth town in New Hampshire, inviting on account of its extensive salt meadows, was settled, under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, by orthodox emigrants from that colony. In a controversy which presently arose between Wheelwright and the settlers at Hampton as to their mutual bounds, in answer to Wheelwright's allegation of a purchase from the Indians, the Massachusetts General Court set up the doctrine that the Indians "had only a natural right to as much land as they had or could improve"-a hard doctrine, indeed, for the Indians, if improvement meant cultivation, since the Indians improved their lands chiefly as hunting grounds.